Today is the day! The day I’m going to walk you through exactly how John and I track our budget. By the end, you might think I’m a genius, or you might think I’m absolutely insane. Maybe we’ll take a poll :) The reason I say that is because it is not the simplest system (at least on the surface), but it works very well for us. And that’s the point — if there’s one thing I’d like for you to take away from these posts, it’s to find a tracking system that works for you, and stick to it. It might take several tries to find a system that is aligned with your strengths and guards against your weaknesses, but once you find it, you’ll be golden. Seriously, if you can stick to a budget, I truly believe your life possibilities will expand rapidly in front of you. Alright, on with it. Our system was custom designed by John on Google Docs. (To give credit where credit is due, it was inspired by a budget Jenna’s husband designed.) Let’s start by laying out a few pros and cons of our system: Good for someone who: — is incentivized by saving — is a more natural saver than spender / likes to know exactly where her money is going — likes to look at spending data over time Bad for someone who: — does not have an interest in record keeping — is prone to overspending There are a LOT of moving parts to our budgeting system, but I’ll walk you through them. John has put together a dummy copy of our budget for you all to use if you’d like, and it will probably help to open that doc in another tab so you can reference it while you